The (often difficult) process of illustrating

I thought I would document the making of a particular scene for my next story: Petunia. Turns out, it’s been a tough one. That’s actually good because now I can show a less glamorous side of the artistic process that is absolutely necessary if you want to create something to match your artistic vision.

So, the vision for this scene is a leviathan sea creature rising from the deep and carrying Petunia up above the waves. I know I want it to be dramatic, and that I want the sea creature to be a massively imposing beast.

I almost always start of with a very small thumbnail sketch in pencil & watercolor. This lets me easily see all of the large color shapes & contrasts. So far, so good.

When I’ve got a thumbnail I’m happy with, I’ll do a larger ink & watercolor version. This time I tried switching the cloud layer, but because it has to blend with the previous image, I probably won’t keep it that way. This is my first attempt at creating the creature, and my first mistake. In hind sight I should have been doing pages and pages of creature sketches before ever getting to this point.

But, instead, I went ahead and started painting on the 14″ tall panel I have been using for the story. I got as far as you see here, before realizing I really wasn’t crazy about the creature, and needed to go back and rethink the design.

Ahh, here we go – that’s more like it, right?

So I take my favorite sketch, and re-draw it with a grid the size of the space I have to work. This allows me to draw freely first, and then fit the drawing to the picture space after. Now it’s just a matter of transferring the new creature onto the final painting.

To accomplish that I draw a scaled up grid over the existing painting using chalk. The chalk will easily wipe off with water so I much prefer it to pencil. Then I just copy the sketch onto the panel and start painting!

Hmmmm… Well, it doesn’t look right. This is supposed to be a leviathan of the deep. Cold blooded, lurking below the waves. Menacing. A predator at the top of the food chain. Not a happy go lucky blimp with wings and bug eyes. Drat. Back to the sketch-pad.

After another round of pencil sketches & various studies, I’m feeling pretty happy with this one. Take three.

By now you know the drill.

So I’ve taken this a bit farther in the rendering. I’m not 100% happy with the creature – it’s still not old and grumpy enough – but I think I can work with it with textures and small changes here and there. For now though, after all of these steps, the best thing I can do is put it aside and work on another scene for a while. It can take a few days for your mental image of the painting to catch up with what is already on the canvas, and I don’t want to rush things.

So that’s all for now folks! Hope you enjoyed this quick glimpse into the sometimes torturous process of illustration!

***UPDATE***

Hi again! So it has been almost two whole months since this post, and I wanted to share with you all the final steps. As I said, I did put it aside, and I went on to illustrating another scene. This scene features the same creature, but in a more menacing situation. Here’s a really bad photo showing the first take at painting that scene:

Getting the chance to start fresh helped me to rethink the teeth, the skin, the eyes, and a whole bunch of other things that had bothered me before. So, when I finally went back to the first scene, it was a breeze to get a way more impressive image:

Basically, my process is inherently iterative. I’m sure there are illustrators out there who can envision what they want right away and paint it – and I envy them! But for me it’s a process.